


Intangible

by Beleriandings



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Emotional Hurt-Comfort, F/M, Nightmares, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-11
Updated: 2017-11-11
Packaged: 2019-01-31 23:57:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12692820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: Barry has to sleep. Lup can't. But even liches have their ghosts to come back and haunt them.





	Intangible

Lup thought she had long ago given up pacing, all those years trapped in the dark.

Nevertheless, now she drifted in a distinctly pacing sort of way in the corner of the darkened bedroom. The air was quite still, but the trailing, spectral tendrils of red that suggested the edge of her lich form’s red robe rippled out of pure restlessness.

She let a quiet wave of red electric charge crackle down her arms; it lit up the shadow-swathed room, calming her just a fraction. _It would do_. She didn’t want to risk any more light or a louder sound; after all, the very last thing she wanted was to wake Barry, finally lying fast asleep on one side of the double bed in the centre of the room.

He was sprawled half on his stomach in a sort of haphazard nest of pillows, blanket kicked off so one foot stuck out. She drifted over, tucking it back under the blanket with gentle tenderness; it was all she could do just now.

That was the frustrating part, of course; her senses in this form were so limited. Sometimes, on dark nights, it even sent her mind back to that dark curtained room, her prison of ten years. She had almost come apart that way several times, though now - _thank the gods_ \- she always had people she loved and trusted close by to bring her back.

If Lup had disliked incorporeality before, she now hated it with all the fire in her heart. In the darkness, she could too easily succumb to that nowhere place, that void of oblivion. Day time was good; in the day, there was so much rebuilding to do, and she was surrounded by voices and furious activity. Taako was there, and Barry, and Magnus, Lucretia, Merle and Davenport, and all the others they had gathered to them as family along the way. She and Barry were going to start their new jobs as Reapers next week; Kravitz was just finalising the paperwork, Taako had reported with a roll of his eyes. But she knew as well as she knew anything that they would totally crush it as Necrobusters, when the time came.

But in the meantime, there was… well, _time_. And everyone she knew had to sleep sometimes. She had known, of course, the sheer number of hours that humans need to sleep. She had often flitted around the Starblaster in her lich form, frustrated and impatient; the gods knew that even recently she spent her loneliest hours alone in the Umbra Staff, while Taako was sleeping or meditating.

Still, she reminded herself, that particular prison was in the past now. She had been freed for eight days now, and for the first few, both Taako and Barry had tried to stay awake for her. Taako slept or meditated in short, half-waking catnaps, never for long enough at a stretch to aleviate the bags under his eyes, no matter how much cosmetic magic he applied to his face. Barry, on the other hand, simply threw himself into the rebuilding work, as though he didn’t know how _not_ to work. He had always been a little like that, of course, but now the difference was marked; he didn’t even bother denying it, simply grinned rather maniacally and poured a fantasy espresso into his electric-blue energy potion and slammed it, making even Magnus look on in slightly awed horror.

That they were trying to stay awake for _her_ , specifically, was never spoken of course; still, by this point Lup understood both so well that she could easily put it together. It made her heart ache, knowing that they were both so afraid to close their eyes in case she wasn’t there when they awoke.

Not that she didn’t appreciate the company. But neither of their strategies, of course, was sustainable in the long term, and they all knew it. Eventually she had lost her patience and cast sleep on Taako. Though not without whispered reassurances that she would still be there when he got back, so by the time his eyes closed, he was at least smiling. She had tucked him into his own bed, spending a while watching over him, before tearing herself away to check on Barry.

When she got back to the room Lucretia had given them, though, she had had to smile; Barry was already asleep, slumped over the desk. When she had levitated him to the bed - she only wished she could touch him, pick him up for real, hold him as she once had - she realised there was a mark imprinted on the skin of his cheek, from a small metal object that had been pressed to his face where he had fallen asleep on the desk.

After putting Barry to bed, she had gone back to it with some curiosity. Her skeletal ghost-fingers had actually been able to interact with it, which at first surprised her; at least until she realised just what it was she was holding.

Her somewhat middling investigation check had allowed her to see the obvious: it was a coin. Heavy, a little larger than a regular gold piece, but otherwise rather drab and unobtrusive bronze. She could feel a little magic in it, though the spell wasn’t a particularly powerful one.

Still, she had barely needed a better check, in the end. With what she had heard when she was trapped in the Umbra Staff, she could very well infer what the object was, and that was much more than it seemed. She thought, with a pang, of the words she had heard it say, tender words spoken in Barry’s voice, followed by pragmatic instructions. She remembered Taako holding it, following its directions like a lifeline even as suspicion and distrust at everything and everyone else ate at him, while Lup had mustering all the energy she had amassed to get him some message, anything that would pierce the static fog in his mind.

Lup had held the coin, for a while, turning it over in her hands almost reverentially. Then she had placed it in the bedside table, within Barry’s easy reach.

That had been several hours ago.

It had been a long, long night. Everyone was asleep, and she didn’t begrudge them it, but she had been growing more and more restless. There was only so much that one could do in the moon base of a top-secret organisation while one’s family are all sleeping, and over this night she had done almost all of it already. She had explored the Bureau of Balance, had stared down at the planet below from the huge, dizzying window in the floor, had gone into the chamber that had previously been home to Fisher and drifted in front of the cavernous, smashed tank for a while, lost in thought. She had floated through barriers closing off the parts of the base that were closed off for repairs. The series of vast circular holes where a sphere had smashed through, the glittering shards of the shattered ceiling in the great hall glinting like crystal in the light of the real moon as she passed by alone.

The damage would be fixed, she knew. With time, and magic, there would be hardly a sign on the moonbase of the attack by the Hunger, the near-apocalypse they had averted.

Of course, there were other signs. Sometimes, as they passed over the planet below, Lup could still see circles of black glass, reflecting the moonlight like mirrors, made small by the distance. Each one still felt like a fierce stab of cold in her incorporeal heart. Yet, she had to smile with some pride as she saw the one Taako – her dumb genius of a brother, who she always knew would gain back everything he had lost and come out even stronger than ever – had transmuted to shining sapphire. She didn’t even know precisely how he had done it; something about another world and a spicy, tasty dish that he had apparently named after himself, and a new best friend in another plane. Lup still wasn’t entirely clear on that, but there would be time, she knew. There was so much to find and to build in this new world, which was truly their home now, more than it had ever been when they first arrived here over a decade ago.

But still, eventually she had been drawn away from the window to the surface. There were many hours until dawn, and there was only so much a solitary lich can do in a top-secret moonbase. Well, that wasn’t true, but Lup didn’t feel like doing any of the _really_ good stuff; that required her family to properly be appreciated, and they were all asleep.

Which was good and necessary for them, she had to remind herself.

She had made her way back through the bedrooms, in time. She had checked in on Taako – found him lying exactly where she had left him, had contemplated drawing dicks on his face in fantasy Sharpie but had settled in the end for just levitating an extra blanket over him – and drifted back through the hallways to Barry’s and her room.

She floated there for a long, long time, just listening to the sound of his even breaths in the still night air. The sheer _ordinariness_ of the sight, after all this time, was like a blow to her heart, making her flicker a little; he had even built his usual inexplicable cocoon of pillows, a  tendancy which she shared and Taako had always mercilessly denounced both of them for.

At that moment a sound from the other side of the room caught her attention; Barry was stirring in his sleep, turning over and tangling the covers even further around his legs. Immediately, Lup was drifting closer, the hem of her spectral robe flaring and rippling in agitation, without her conscious effort.

He turned over in his sleep again, throwing an arm over his face; she reached out a hand to wake him, but a moment later drew it back, unsure; he needed this sleep, she knew. She didn’t want to take it from him, again. _Maybe this was just… how he was now._

That thought hurt too; there were many times, while Lup was trapped in the Umbra Staff, that she had had to listen to Taako get up and pace around because he couldn’t focus on his meditation, and then some nights he had tried to sleep when he was beset by nightmares.

Of course, during their century-long journey there had always been nightmares, for all of them; a century of dying, and running, and fighting just to survive, seeing worlds destroyed in one’s wake does that to a person. She knew she’d be just the same, if she was still in her body and able to sleep at all.

But it was different now. Or at least she feared it would be. She looked down at Barry, hesitating still; they had been apart for so long, and suddenly she felt a stab of irrational fear; she had known the pattern of those old nightmares. But that wasn’t true, anymore. He had told her some of it in the days since they had been reunited, but what were days in the face of ten years? She hadn’t told him everything either; she hadn’t yet felt ready or able to talk about her lost days, that fearful void of empty time. The oppressive oblivion of a decade of deprivation of… well, _everything,_ without even a way to measure the endless days becoming months becoming years, with no end in sight. How sometimes she had felt like the darkness had eaten its way into her very soul, changed her permanently.

He understood her silences of course, just as he understood her words; she knew he would wait as long as it took, as long as she needed. And when the time came he would listen, and he would help, even if it was only by listening.

But it went the other way, too. She didn’t know what Barry had seen, what he had had to do, what he had faced without her. And if she didn’t know, then how could she help him through those fears?

He cried out in his sleep, turning over again, and this time she did go to his bedside, reaching out a hand to wake him with a tender touch, on mere instinct. But no; of course, her hand simply passed through his cheek, instead of coming to rest against the side of his face.

“No!” he mumbled in some dream, eyes moving under his lids. “No, don’t… I have to remember, I can’t forget again…” there were tears under his lashes. “No, it was _real_. No, no you can’t… I can’t go back to…”

“Barry!” she whispered, yet still she felt… unwilling to break the hush of the room. “Babe, it’s… it’s me… it’s okay…”

He seemed to half wake, at that. His eyes flickered open, so wide that she could see the whites, all around, but he didn’t seem to see the room, or her, the ends of the nightmare still holding him fast. With a sudden motion, he lunged to the side, pushing his face into the pillow while his hand darted to the bedside table, grasping something there without even needing to look. _The coin_ , Lup realised. She stared, unsure what to do; but as Barry touched it, his own voice echoed from it.

“ _This is for when you wake up_ ” said the voice. “ _You uh… you aren’t getting any static now, so we don’t need to go through_ _all_ _the usual stuff. But just know that it was all real. Lup is really back. Even if she_ _might_ _not_ _be here_ _right now, she’s not far away. The Hunger is gone. You… you did it. You got through it. It’s gonna be okay_ …”

Barry – real, corporeal Barry – blinked blearily a few times, raised his head and reached out a clumsy hand again for the bedside table. He scrabbled for his glasses, put them on, and sat up, squinting into the darkness. He sounded guarded, reverential almost. “Lup…! Is… is that really you?”

Lup could have cried if she had had a body. “Yeah babe,” she said, her form lighting up with a warm red glow that she was fairly sure was everything to do with the relieved, dopy grin spreading across Barry’s sleepy face. She immediately floated over so that she was as close to him as she could be, short of actual and literal possession. “Yeah, I’m right here.”

Barry smiled, leaning his head against the approximate shoulder of her spectral form and rubbing the back of his neck, a little self-conscious. He turned the coin over and over in his hand, clutching it like a talisman. Or, perhaps, like he had used to hold her real, tangible hand. “Huh” he said, laughing a little. “Guess I never did get over that fear of the dark.”

“Well, at least I can do something about that.” She held out a hand, letting red sparks run down her arm once more to flare into a small, bright flame in her hand, that lit the whole room in a warm coppery glow. “That help?”

“Yeah” said Barry, smiling a little wider. “Yeah, it does.”

They were silent for a little while, simply enjoying being close to each other as Barry’s breathing slowed down. Finally, Lup spoke. “You know I’m not gonna go anywhere again… right?”

He smiled, scrubbing distractedly at the unshed tears that were still glistening under his glasses. “Yeah” he said. “I know. I just…” he knocked himself on the side of the head, gently. “Ten years of brain-fog and missing you, and my rude-ass unconscious mind has something else to say about it. But don’t worry.” He gripped the coin tight, leaning closer to where she floated in empty air. “I know.”

 _Gods_ , Lup wished she could just kiss him, hold him in her arms again. “I… I know you’ve been through some shit while I was gone. And… just… if and when you want to talk about it…”

He looked up at her. “You know what? Yeah. Actually… I’d like to try? If…” he blushed a little. “If you’re okay with that?”

“I’m here all night, babe.” She grinned, and the light in her hand flared a little brighter. “Also like… forever. Definitely that too.”

“Yeah” he said. “Yeah, I reckon we’ve got all the time in the world, now.”


End file.
